In a letter to a national newspaper on March 26, Mr Paxman claimed he had been told by the BBC to set up a company to receive his payments for presenting Newsnight, or stop working for the broadcaster altogether.

Companies House documents show Mr Paxman runs a personal service company called Out in the Dark Limited. Its 2011 accounts show that it received £92,077 during the year, down from £239,411 in the year before.

Mr Paxman said that being paid through a service company was a condition of employment at the broadcaster. He insisted that the “BBC required me to form a company if I wanted to continue to present Newsnight. They claimed they had been told to do so by HMRC.”

By all accounts, Mr Paxman was merely following established practice among colleagues in the newsroom. Reports have suggested that newsreaders Fiona Bruce, Joanne Gosling, Emily Maitlis, Gavin Esler, Sophie Raworth as well as radio broadcaster Chris Evans are paid this way.

There is no suggestion that Mr Paxman or any of these presenters are avoiding tax, and HMRC has flatly denied that it had told the BBC to put more staff on service contracts.

Related Articles

But Mr Paxman’s comments were politically incendiary, coming just weeks after it had emerged that civil servants had knowingly agreed a similar deal with Ed Lester, head of the Student Loans Company.

In February, it emerged – ironically, in part, in a Newsnight report - that Mr Lester’s £182,000 a year, bonus and pension package was paid via a personal service company he owns.

Accountants were quick to explain that this would allow Mr Lester to pay corporation tax of 21 per cent on his earnings, rather than the 50 per cent top rate, on his earnings, saving him as much as £40,000 a year.

A slew of emails, released under the Freedom of Information Act, showed that officials in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills were aware that this arrangement would cut his tax bill. One civil servant even described the deal as “tax efficient” for Mr Lester.

The emails showed Mr Lester’s deal was signed off by Universities minister David Willetts and Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury.

To limit the political damage, Mr Alexander ordered a review which found that 2,400 Whitehall officials were paid more than £58,000 a year this way. He told them to change their financial arrangements or have their contracts terminated.

Mr Alexander said he was unable to provide similar figures for vast swathes of the National Health Service and the BBC, because they were not directly controlled by central Government. By now MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, who have a duty to monitor public spending, had started to try to fill in the blanks.

It resulted in a stormy evidence session with Zarin Patel, the BBC’s chief financial officer, in July. Under close questioning, Ms Patel disclosed that BBC employed hundreds of news presenters and on air talent through the service companies. Some 342 ‘stars’ were paid over £50,000 a year.

Yet by last night the BBC risked being accused of misleading the committee after it released revised figures which showed the number of stars paid more than £50,000 a year had increased to “around 400”. In addition, it disclosed for the first time that 1,500 of its "on-screen" talent were paid through service companies.

The BBC admitted that many of the contractors were on deals that “can often share the characteristics of typical PAYE contracts”, raising major questions about why the arrangement was set up in the first place. The broadcaster could not be sure that the correct tax was being paid by its employees.

Margaret Hodge MP, the chairman of the PAC which published its findings today, described the practice as “staggeringly inappropriate”.

She told The Daily Telegraph: “I want the BBC to stop and call a halt to what is completely unacceptable use of tax avoidance schemes.

"The BBC’s revenues are from hard earned taxes from ordinary families and they have a duty they have a duty to lead by example – they have a double duty to be cleaner than clean.”

For its part, the BBC responded with a terse 24-word statement. A spokesman said: “We note the conclusions of the PAC report and will respond to the points raised as part of our detailed review of tax arrangements.”

But it seems likely that within months, some of Britain’s best known stars will be forced by the BBC to give explicit guarantees that they are paying their fair share of tax, or disappear from our screens for ever.